[...]Twitter Friends and the Influence of Influentials in Word of Mouth Marketing « Skilful Minds[...]…

[...]Twitter Friends and the Influence of Influentials in Word of Mouth Marketing « Skilful Minds[...]…

[...]Twitter Friends and the Influence of Influentials in Word of Mouth Marketing « Skilful Minds[...]…

Enjoyed your post/comment. As always, your thinking is both interesting and stimulating in its attention to what is social about social media. Not enough people who use social media to inform strategy ask that question. I don’t disagree with your point that the Dunbar Number is limited as a way to explain the range of conversational dynamics over time. My point, following that of Ross Mayfield, was that social software such as Twitter allows us to manage those dynamics. I take that to be the point of your quote from Benjamin whose work I’ve read and appreciated. Am I wrong?

As an aside, my personal favorite from Benjamin is his work on Baudelaire.

The HP study essentially makes a point about reciprocity in directed social networks. My take on their findings, aside from the question of the Dunbar Number’s relevance, is that influence does not depend on the number of followers or friends of an individual twitter user. Connections, as you rightly note, are not engagement. Distinguishing the influence of people by the number of followers, or the number of people they follow, seems like the equivalent of traditional mass media’s concern with audience to me. Although this is probably a trivial, taken-for-granted assumption by informed users of social media, I can’t tell you how many ads I’ve seen lately for social media consultants in which the number of followers of a candidate is treated as an indication of how much social media savvy they possess.

If we look beyond Twitter to the larger category of using social software in marketing, I agree with your comment that,

“A smart marketing tool would thus not use influence, but would use conversation dynamics and transient properties of social media conversations and their participants, to determine not who to impress, but rather how to distribute by means of user-centric social media communication networks.”

As far as your archetype distinction goes, I think talking about archetypes or personalities is treating the medium as psychological rather than social. People come to social media as individuals and, as you rightly note, the responses they experience shape their overall pattern of engagement. However, I’m more inclined to think their patterns of engagement don’t result from personality as much as their overall grasp of the communication afforded by the application architecture and the responses they experience over time as they participate in it by communicating with others.

Your recent tweets indicate an appreciation for the dynamics of gift giving in social networks. Gouldner provided one of the best updates I know of to the classic literature of Durkheim, Mauss, and Simmel on the topic. He distinguished between the norm of reciprocity and the norm of beneficence to explain the dynamics of how gift giving kicks off relationships of exchange that reciprocity maintains. Unlike traditional, or industrial, society, gifting on social networks is almost entirely symbolic though that doesn’t mean the reciprocal connections made remain symbolic.

Great post. i think there’s little doubt that in talk tools like twitter, which are time-based and conversational (of a form), the Dunbar number, while constant, probably includes a smaller number of active conversation participants.

Let’s say that some percentage of the Dunbar number is a close set of friends, with whom daily interaction is not necessary to sustain engagement and maintain the relationship — but with whom that conversation might be very grounding, rewarding, and meaningful.

There might be another percentage that is a set of peers — members of one’s network with whom coded and informative exchanges serve to surface, explore, share discoveries and create collaborations.

And there might be some percentage given over to new contacts, or more accurately, twitter partners in talk — transient network members with whom a relationship is latent but not yet enduring. People for whom we are available for talk, but with whom we have no explicit commitment to maintain contact. The conversational activity among members of this subset would be more governed by the etiquette and practices common to the social tool in use: twitter is not blog commenting is not facebook friending is not linkedin answering and so on.

I would like to see some research into twitter networks that is diachronic — which tracks conversation over time and correlates that with follower/following count.

I would expect that the number of transient relationships increases with an increase in followers/following. Does the Dunbar number hold steady? Or is it the wrong metric altogether for conversation monitoring? I suspect it’s the wrong metric. Our ability to sustain engagements would more likely be a matter of our attention spent on the site/service, our interest in it (which goes through phases), our “goals,” our experience to date and historically with the site (rising interest after adoption, plateau, fade out, rediscovery….), and of course the runs of talk themselves (talk increases around cultural news and events).

I would imagine that these conversation engagement metrics would also correlate to user personality types, and to the differences between monological, dialogical, and relational (Self, Other, Relational activity-oriented) “archetypes” of people in general.

To wit, a Self-oriented person might talk more if s/he believes he commands a bigger and more attentive audience. Stats revealing traffic to his site, click throughs on his links, retweets and @replies will embolden his/her engagement and make him/her more enthusiastic about tweeting.

An Other-oriented person might talk more the more @names and Directs s/he receives. Being inclined to respond to people, and to engage in one-to-one conversations, this user’s increasing following count will likely create more conversations — but possibly very passing and transient ones — as many of them are of course greetings and introductions (what we do when we meet people).

A Relational/activity oriented person might @name @name @name people more the more s/he sees group activity on twitter. This being the kind of interaction that is least well supported in twitter (multiple D messaging isn’t possible, for example, cutting out backchannel chat). Chat-style communication, which is necessary to create a sense of communal or group involvement and interaction, isn’t possible in twitter. So the relational/activity oriented user must sustain an awareness of social groups over time — this is a gate to group interactions. [I'm finding that Yammer, which I use with adhocnium members, is a twitter-chat tool for me. There's no sense that a public reads our posts, and we conduct a slow chat over Yammer that in which, almost paradoxically, the @reply becomes a sidechannel!]

A smart marketing tool would thus not use influence, but would use conversation dynamics and transient properties of social media conversations and their participants, to determine not who to impress, but rather how to distribute by means of user-centric social media communication networks.

I’ll put this in Benjamin’s language: Communication in the age of its technical mediation is contingent no longer on the interaction handling of facework but on the loosely-coupled coordination of asynchronously sustained individual commitments. I nearly called them “commentments.” (reference is The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin)

(This became so long that I’ll blog it on my site, too. Thanks for the inspiration — keep it going!)

Absolutely! An effective approach to social networking will, ironically, be a near perfect copy of “real” person-to-person, social networks. This approach will bring the web-based social network to the “real” WOM network.

Why not simply “webinize” the WOM process that has consistently delivered the most qualified leads? Why can’t businesses increase their sales by connecting to their network of satisfied customers, neighbors and friends in a Web-based social network like Facebook?

Two requirements for such a network are spelled-out at http://is.gd/gJ7y.

Such a system would eliminate the time and expense of creating and updating a Web page. A simple, user-friendly design would be as easy to set up and use as a Facebook page, while allowing businesses to know exactly where their best new customers are coming from. (They could even voluntarily reward them to show their appreciation.)

As we say at YouGottaCall.com, “Reward the community by empowering trusted relationships.”

– - Tim